"Aristotle strove to save the particulars, or commonplace reals, from the realm of doxa or illusion to which Parmenides and Plato had relegated them. For Plato, particular existents are really only partially existent and hence are unknowable -- since what does not really exist cannot really be known, as Parmenides pointed out (fr. 2). What is knowable, according to this view, is the noumenal structure of primordial abstractions arranged as a hierarchy of ontic genera which do not necessarily touch the commonsense reals."